The Team-Up Scene In Endgame That Didn't Make It To The Final Cut
That's one expensive cut.
Since the release of Avengers: Endgame, various members of its creative team have revealed numerous moments that were cut or truncated to preserve the three-hour film's pacing. Among these sequences was a moment the movie's co-writer Christopher Markus called "the biggest amount of star power" to ever be cut in film history.
Markus' remarks came as part of an extensive oral history of Endgame's climactic battle, in which the flick's producer Trinh Tran, editor Jeff Ford, Markus and his co-writer Stephen McFeely, and others broke down for Slashfilm what it took to bring the scene to the screen. Markus referred to the sequence in question as the "trench scene," describing it as a moment that features the Giant-Man version of Ant-Man offering some of his fellow Avengers a place to catch their breath in the middle of the melee.
"It was actually kind of awesome," Markus explained. "Giant-Man dug [a huge trench] either with his hand or with his foot, and they all jumped into it because [they] needed a brief rest. I think there are some videos online that somebody — probably [Bruce Banner actor Mark] Ruffalo — took, but we had all of them in a weird foam trench in a sound stage."
The way Markus describes it, it sounds like a scene that could have lent itself to some seriously funny or seriously touching exchanges considering all the different personality types interacting under extreme stress while crammed into a trench. Unfortunately, the moment got scrapped, and the scribe pointed to how it broke up the flow of the battle as the primary reason.
"We shot it, and it was not a good scene, because it was a pause in the middle of the action," Markus said. "I remember doing that, and remember kind of knowing while we were doing it that, 'Eh, it's probably not going to make it. This is the biggest amount of star power that's going to get cut in history.' It was sort of like, 'We've got all of them, we've got the set, the scene doesn't work — shoot it anyway.'"
The scene was deleted over more than just pacing
In an interview with The New York Times, Markus and McFeely noted that there might have been tonal inconsistencies, as well as a lack of realism, in the trench scene that also played into why it landed on the cutting room floor.
"It didn't play well, but we had a scene in a trench where, for reasons, the battle got paused for about three minutes, and now there's 18 people all going, 'What are we going to do?' 'I'm going to do this." "I'm going to do this," McFeely said. "When you have that many people, it invariably is, one line, one line, one line. And that's not a natural conversation."
McFeely rather harshly described the moment as a "completely fake, fraudulent scene" that featured a bunch of characters "just bouncing around." Following that up, Markus further clarified his own opinion on why the moment never made it into the film, noting that pausing amid the fight just wasn't true to the dynamics of that battle.
"It also required them to find enough shelter to have a conversation in the middle of the biggest battle," Markus said. "It wasn't a polite World War I battle where you have a moment."
Of course, it should be noted that in a sequence involving the likes of a spider-powered teenager, a cosmically-supercharged Air Force pilot, a super-soldier who spent seven decades frozen at the bottom of the ocean, and a guy in a powered exoskeleton fighting an intergalactic warlord for a bunch of rocks that have the power to destroy the universe, reality is going to be at least partially out the window. The scribes should be commended, then, for still striving to keep any one portion of the battle from feeling too contrived, no matter how outlandish the situation may have been.
Of course, we're also talking about beloved actors playing iconic characters, some of which weren't given a chance to interact during the battle at all. While the cut scene might not have been as epic as other moments in that final Endgame battle, it could still have had merit in terms of pure fan service. Luckily for fans, they can judge for themselves, thanks to the movie's blooper reel.
Part of the Avengers: Endgame trench scene is viewable online
While Markus pointed to flagrant spoiler machine Ruffalo as potentially having leaked the deleted scene, the moment actually appeared in an official clip from the movie's blooper reel. First debuting on Entertainment Weekly before Endgame's digital, 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD releases, the four-second snippet reveals which characters would have appeared in the trench, and gives fans an idea of what the scene could have been.
The unfinished footage features key characters like Spider-Man (Tom Holland), the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Okoye (Danai Gurira), War Machine (Don Cheadle), Nebula (Karen Gillan), Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), and Captain America (Chris Evans), as well as stand-ins for Zoe Saldana's Gamora and Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark. Everyone is huddled close together, and are looking up at something above them.
In the middle of the action, Star-Lord and Hawkeye suddenly begin to scramble around. Pratt seems to be playing around, but Renner — who is holding the Infinity Gauntlet under one arm — is moving as if on cue. From the blocking and placement of individual characters, it looks as if the scene was possibly concerned with who the Gauntlet was being passed off to next, or what the plan was for keeping it out of Thanos' grimy, purple hands.
Considering who was featured in the cut scene, it feels like it could have provided an opportunity for some hilarious exchanges between the film's more straight-faced characters and its goofier ones. But, while it certainly would have been cool to see fans' responses to the moment, it's also fair to say there were more than enough awesome team-ups in Endgame to satisfy the Marvel faithful — and it's easy to see how the final battle's pacing benefited from the trench scene's exclusion.
Having said that... wow. That sure is a lot of money to leave on the cutting room floor.